OpenNTF Friday Review 6

Posted by Steve Castledine on October 30, 2009

I don't know about you but everything
around OpenNTF feels like a whirlwind right now, lots of new content (best
new quality in a short period for a long time for me), Notes Domino base
templates being made available on OpenNTF (a first), Notes Domino Discussion
Template being open sourced on OpenNTF (another first), constant top 1-5
on Planetlotus.org interest (giving edbrill.com a run for his money), Lotusphere
2010 planning, competitions (and not just competitions but LOTUS awards),
large numbers of new registrations (over 7,000 since Lotusphere 2009),
high download traffic and record page hits. I also see "new"
interest in adding code to OpenNTF and people identifying "how OpenNTF
can work for you".

Our biggest problem is actually keeping
up with everyone's expectations, which is nice, but can be frustrating
so please bear with us sometimes as we move the 7 year old environment
forward. We finally have all servers running the same version of Domino
(8.5.1) and we are near to having a new catalog which is important as we
have many GPL and Apache entries queued up for entry (the existing GPL
one keeps corrupting for some reason). The upgrade of the project management
system is taking longer than planned which really is my fault due to time
but the old system is holding out ok (just doesn't always look great).
If anyone wants to help form a project group for this then let me know.

The forums will get yet another update
soon, with the 8.5.1 servers being in place we will replace it with the
base 8.5.1 version, add in the OpenNTF styling and move forward from there
and add in the results from the Discussion next generation project. We
have had some IE8 issues etc due to the Domino/Dojo version so hopefully
this is/will be resolved.

Lotus AwardsAs you have heard
from Niklas Heidloff already,
its very exciting that OpenNTF has two award categories in this years "Lotus
Awards". This demonstrates a fair size commitment from IBM for this
project.

The official Lotus Award details are
also here, however the important
detail, which is missing from the awards site but will be updated soon,
is the fact that entries need to be in by January 6th 2010. If you
read Niklas's blog entry linked above you will see all the conditions and
what the judges are looking for etc but basically you need to have the
code on OpenNTF and the second important information is to register
your entry at the Lotus Awards site using the Nomination
process and form. Now personally
the form has a few questions which are not relevant to our category but
we need to use the Lotus Award system, so bear with us and we will recognise
that some parts of the form are not always necessary for an open source
project. Any queries email us direct or use support at openntf dot org
with the word 'award' in the subject.

Lotusphere 2010So far it is in our planning to have
an open, annual general meeting at Lotusphere 2010. The details are still
being worked on so more soon. We also hope to place a position in the developers
lab for OpenNTF so someone is always available for your questions. We thought
this was better than a full pedestal as that is too detached from the "developers"
area and logistically was easier for potential IBM representation.

We have other sessions pencilled in,
however it is too early to talk about these as the track managers are still
doing their planning work.

Technical CommitteeAs I mentioned at the top of this post,
we have all the servers running 8.5.1, and we are, slowly, updating various
parts that continue to cause us problems. We have also carried out an environment
survey, thanks to Gab of Turtle Partnership, in order to make sure things
are running as smoothly and securely as possible, We are also grateful
to Prominic here for their efforts in keeping everything up and running.

I also mentioned the project management
system is behind on being upgraded (its a huge task) and again will repeat
if anyone wants to help form an action group to speed this up - just let
me know.

TriStateLugContinuing our stadium tour around the
world, Bruce Elgort will be presenting a session on OpenNTF at the TriStateLug
in New York November 9th. This session will be key noted by Bob Picciano.

New ContentSince the last friday review I think
we have had the best period of great new projects for a long time, in my
opinion anyway. This is all on top of the great news about adding most
of the Notes Domino base templates to OpenNTF. So for the first time you
can download these templates outside of the Notes Domino installation (yay!).

In no particular order here are some
highlights:

xTalk
Discussion Forums - xTalk Discussion
Forums is a 100% XPages application written for IBM Lotus Notes And Domino
8.5.1 utilizing XPages in the Notes Client styled after many of the popular
PHP web forums

Time
Tracker - Time Management experts
will tell you an individual only has 24 hours in a single day; proper time
management isn't finding time in your day, but rather discovering and dealing
with inefficiencies in your day.

File
Explorer - The File Explorer is
a sidebar plugin to explore files in the OS file system. The plugin supports
Drag&Drop of files from/to Notes.

XPages
Namepicker - A picker control
for selecting notes names out of the Domino Directory, inspired by the
Facebook namepicker.

SSO
for Web for non Windows Servers
- Achieve single sign-on for Domino Web users in an environment where some
servers are Domino Windows 8.5.1 servers and other servers are on alternate
platforms.

Widget
Library - various widgets that
can be run in the IBM Lotus Notes client.

PlainTextView
- This sidebar element displays the selected mail message as plaintext.
This means, a Notes message is displayed with no format and a internet
mail message is displayed with all the MIME headers and information.

assono
Framework 2 - assono Framework
2 is a great fundament for developing modern Notes client and Domino Web
applications. It consists of a system of LotusScript classes, forms, views
etc. which fulfill most non-functional requirements for applications thus
you can concentrate on the specific requirements of your current project.